Monday, 28 April 2014

What has it been, less than a month since Jeff Bezos bought the most promising tool for renewing the mass distribution of comics in the digital era? I’ll give the man this: he’s moved faster to undermine an existing technology for the benefit of his own company than General Motors did when it sabotaged Los Angeles’s public transit Red Line for the benefit of the bus fleet they wanted to sell the City of Angels. Job well done, Jeff.

Interesting — previously, only Apple’s CEOs (Jobs, then Cook) have appeared at the Swisher/Mossberg conference. Late May is kind of crummy timing for this, though, coming just before, instead of after, Apple’s WWDC announcements.

Great idea, and benefits everyone: subjects, readers, and Vox. It’s hard to claim you are being quoted “out of context” when the context is a click away. Likewise, it’s harder for the interviewers to take things out of context.

Friday, 25 April 2014

My thanks to Bellroy for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Bellroy is a new company that specializes in creating slim, stylish, functional wallets — like the Slim Sleeve, the ultra-compact Hide and Seek, and the Travel Wallet.

Bellroy’s wallets are a great example of the adage that design isn’t how something looks, it’s how it works. These wallets are very functional. They sent me a Slim Sleeve (in Cocoa), and the pull-out tab for infrequently-used cards is very clever. Looks and feels great too — best wallet I’ve ever used.

Today, the New York Times Bits Blog ran an extensive interview
with Francisco Tolmasky, the developer responsible for the first
version of mobile Safari, and he shared some additional details
about the creation of the very first iPhone apps.

Judging by my inbox, an awful lot of coffee was spewed in Cupertino today upon reading Tolmasky’s self-aggrandizing description of his role in Mobile Safari’s creation. There’s a difference between “the developer responsible for the first version of mobile Safari” and “the developer who claims he was responsible for the first version of mobile Safari”.

Update: Said one long-time trusted source: “He definitely was NOT the lead on the project and several other engineers made far more significant contributions.”

Update 2: Ars has changed the headline and appended an update to the article which begins:

This article originally stated that Tolmasky was the leader of
Apple’s Web team; he contacted us to tell us that he was just one
of its five members. The original headline also referred to
Tolmasky as mobile Safari’s “creator,” and Tolmasky made clear to
us that each application was the combined work of multiple people.

“Each one of these things is basically one person,” said Mr.
Tolmasky, while tapping his finger on some of the app icons on
the packaging for the first iPhone. While all members of the
software team worked together on the many different software
elements on the original iPhone before it shipped, each piece had
a person leading it. Mr. Tolmasky said he was the point man on
mobile Safari.

He told how several of the iPhone’s apps and key features came
to be created. The keyboard, he said, was the result of a sort of
hackathon run by Mr. Jobs. The chief executive had been unhappy
with the keyboard prototypes for the iPhone, so he assigned
everyone on the team to work only on keyboards for an entire week.
An engineer on Mr. Tolmasky’s team won the contest, and from
then on his full-time job was to work on the iPhone keyboard.

It’s certainly unusual for a former Apple employee to speak so openly and take so much personal credit for their work at the company. Most stick to the code of silence not out of fear, but because they left the company on good terms and want to keep the door open to perhaps return someday. I suspect Tolmasky doesn’t have to worry about that. (And it strikes me as highly dubious that a 20-year-old, no matter how talented, was in charge of Mobile Safari.)

Four major tech companies including Apple and Google have agreed
to pay a total of $324 million to settle a lawsuit accusing them
of conspiring to hold down salaries in Silicon Valley, sources
familiar with the deal said, just weeks before a high profile
trial had been scheduled to begin.

So are recruiters from Google and Apple now making offers to employees at each other’s company?

As at least one independent commentator has pointed out, it was
not Comcast that was creating viewability issues for Netflix
customers, it was Netflix’s commercial transit decisions that
created these issues. No ISP in the country has been a stronger
supporter of the Open Internet than Comcast – and we remain
committed both to providing our customers with a free and open
Internet and to supporting appropriate FCC rules to ensure that
consumers’ access to the Internet is protected in a legally
enforceable way.

Now it’s out there, and it’s kind of amazing: If the
accusation is true, it means that Netflix shortchanged some of its
customers, for reasons that aren’t quite clear. If it’s not,
it means that Comcast, which has to be on its best behavior as it
tries to get the federal government to bless its Time Warner Cable
deal, has made a damning charge in public that it can’t back up.

(I love too how the legal disclaimer at the end of Comcast’s blog post is three times longer than the post itself.)

Starting in Philadelphia, Comcast built a hometown political
machine and turned it into a national juggernaut. In 2013, the
company spent $18.8 million on federal lobbying, according to the
Center for Responsive Politics. That’s more than all but six other
corporations. The company is also a major donor, making nearly
$5.5 million in federal political contributions during the 2012
cycle. […]

The effort to sideline concerns about consumer protection was
pioneered in Philadelphia in 1999, when Comcast was aided by
City Hall in keeping a rival company, RCN, out of the local
cable market.

“Good God!” Mr. Rendell recalled telling RCN, according to The
Philadelphia Inquirer. “We have to tear up the streets so you can
come in here and compete against one of our best corporate
citizens?”

In sum, Comcast is not charging Netflix for transit service. It is
charging Netflix for access to its subscribers. Comcast also
charges its subscribers for access to Internet content providers
like Netflix. In this way, Comcast is double dipping by getting
both its subscribers and Internet content providers to pay for
access to each other.

It is true that there is competition among the transit providers
and CDNs that transport and localize data across networks. But
even the most competitive transit market cannot ensure sufficient
access to the Comcast network. That’s because, to reach consumers,
CDNs and transit providers must ultimately hand the traffic over
to a terminating ISP like Comcast, which faces no competition. Put
simply, there is one and only one way to reach Comcast’s
subscribers at the last mile: Comcast.

And conversely, for many of us, there is only one way to get high speed internet access at home: Comcast.

In recent weeks I spoke several times with two sources in
Cupertino pertaining to future products to be released by Apple
later this year for the holiday season in the U.S. and Europe.
Judging on the basis of the information revealed in these
conversations, Apple has been working for a long time on a project
that appears to be in its final stages of touch-ups.

What became clear is that the much anticipated Apple smart watch
is not so much a watch as it is a smart band. It would appear that
just as Apple has done with the iPhone and iPad, here too the
technology giant plans to create a focal point around which a new
ecosystem will evolve. To be more specific, Apple is looking to
launch a smart band towards the end of this year whose collection
of sensors will be able to be used not only to monitor the
activity of the wearer, but also to operate other devices as a
gestural controller.

Filed for future claim chowder.

Wednesday, 23 April 2014

But there’s another way of looking at it. Warren Buffett, the
legendary investor, has avoided splitting shares of his Berkshire
Hathaway so resolutely that each one now trades at a whopping
$190,800 per Class A share. (He has bowed to practicality — and
the fact that most people can’t invest nearly $200,000 for a
single share of a stock — by introducing Class B shares that now
go for a more reasonable $127 each).

Mr. Buffett’s logic has been that trying to game the market by
doing stock splits attracts the wrong type of trader: people
looking to trade in and out of a stock, rather than buy and hold
it as a long-term investment. Interestingly, his logic for not
splitting Berkshire stock for all these years matches precisely
the findings of Mr. Dhar and his colleagues. It’s just that Mr.
Buffett would prefer not to have that extra liquidity in Berkshire
stock if it means dealing with shareholders who are looking for a
short-term score.

With its split decision, then, Apple is effectively choosing its
own shareholders — and not the ones who are most likely to stick
with the company when it encounters bad times.

I’m curious too, why Apple chose a 7-for-1 split. As per Apple’s own FAQ, the company’s three previous stock splits were all 2-for-1.

Neil Irwin claims Apple’s move will attract the wrong crowd, but
by almost every metric Apple doesn’t seem to be properly valued:
so is that the “right” crowd? Who needs enemies when you have
friends like that!

iPhone sales were up 17 percent compared to the second quarter
last year (43.7 million phones sold versus 37.4 million the year
before). Revenues from the smartphones were up, too, from $22.95
billion to $26.06 billion, an increase of 13 percent. The iPhone
now accounts for fully 57 percent of Apple’s overall revenues (up
from 53 percent last year).

In his comments, Apple CEO Tim Cook said demand for each of the
three current iPhone models (the iPhone 5s, iPhone 5c, and iPhone
4s) has been stronger than predecessor (a pointed rebuke, perhaps,
to those who have proclaimed the 5c to be a failure). He also
pointed out that phone sales were particularly robust in Asian
markets, particularly Japan and China (where the addition of China
Mobile as a carrier and iPhone 4s pricing led to an all-time sales
record).

iPad sales were effectively flat, year-over-year; Mac sales were slightly up (which is impressive, given the continuing decline of the overall PC market).

The new rules, according to the people briefed on them, will allow
a company like Comcast or Verizon to negotiate separately with
each content company — like Netflix, Amazon, Disney or Google —
and charge different companies different amounts for priority
service.

That, of course, could increase costs for content companies, which
would then have an incentive to pass on those costs to consumers
as part of their subscription prices.

Proponents of net neutrality have feared that such a framework
would empower large, wealthy companies and prevent small
start-ups, which might otherwise be the next Twitter or Facebook,
for example, from gaining any traction in the market.

The question, selected through an online video contest, was posed
via video by small-business owner and former AT&T engineer Joe
Niederberger, a member of the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org.
He asked Obama: “Would you make it a priority in your first year
of office to reinstate Net neutrality as the law of the land? And
would you pledge to only appoint FCC commissioners that support
open Internet principles like Net neutrality?”

He went on to explain the issue briefly: “What you’ve been seeing
is some lobbying that says that the servers and the various
portals through which you’re getting information over the Internet
should be able to be gatekeepers and to charge different rates to
different Web sites… so you could get much better quality from
the Fox News site and you’d be getting rotten service from the mom
and pop sites,” he went on. “And that I think destroys one of the
best things about the Internet — which is that there is this
incredible equality there.”

That means Amazon Prime subscribers will be able to see shows that
have already run on HBO, like “The Sopranos” and “The Wire.” And
they can also watch older seasons of some shows that are still on
the air, like “Girls,” three years after they air.

It’s the first time HBO has offered access to its catalog via a
streaming video service that’s not its own HBO Go. And it gives
Amazon an important bragging right/differentiation point as it
tries to gain ground on rival Netflix.

People familiar with the deal say HBO did not shop the catalog to
Netflix or other potential Amazon rivals.

In short: you still need HBO Go to watch new shows, and the only way to get HBO Go is to pay for HBO with your cable service. But Fire TV is getting HBO Go, too, “targeting a launch by year-end”.

So the sentence “I read a Guardian article” is straightforward.
But what about on Twitter? Any time you mention someone in a
sentence, you use their handle. Which means every name on Twitter
starts with @, a vowel sound. Do we count it? We tried to figure
that out this morning.

I say no — even if you’d say the “at” aloud verbally, in writing you should choose a/an based on the first letter in the Twitter handle, not the @ character. Tricky question though.

ESPN’s Jayson Stark, on the newest member of baseball’s 500 Homers Club:

So the moral of this story remains the same: Lots of men have hit
baseballs over many, many fences. Only the greatest hitters who
ever lived have been the all-around offensive forces that Pujols
has been. And that’s a fact. […]

But suppose we take all those other numbers out of this and focus
just on batting average — which isn’t a measure of power at all
but merely of a man’s ability to hit baseballs where nobody with a
glove is standing.

At .321, Pujols has the fourth-highest average in the entire 500
Homer Club — trailing only those same three men from the previous
list: Williams (.344), Ruth (.342) and Foxx (.325).

Tuesday, 22 April 2014

Join the OS X Beta Seed Program and help make OS X even better.
Install the latest pre-release software, try it out, and submit
your feedback.

Previously, you had to be a registered developer to get access to OS beta seeds.

Update: I was wrong. The Apple Seed Program for non-developers isn’t new — it’s been around as long as Mac OS X has. What’s new is that it’s now open for anyone to join. Until now, it was by invitation only.

Speaking of Greg Christie, I neglected to link to this fascinating piece by Daisuke Wakabayashi for the WSJ last month. It’s a very rare behind-the-scenes look at Apple’s design process. My favorite tidbit: they simulated the iPhone’s performance by using a then-years-old G3 Mac to run the software while it was in development.

Apple made Christie available to Steve Henn of NPR’s All Things Considered, too. To me, that Apple chose Christie for these profiles is a telling sign that his upcoming retirement from Apple is on nothing but the best of terms. The intention was to let Christie — who is extremely well-liked personally and highly-regarded for his work within the company — go out on top, with well-earned credit where credit is due.

Monday, 21 April 2014

Beats CEO Ian Rogers says the decision to sell within the Apple
app was fairly straightforward: More than half of Beats users use
iPhones, and it’s very hard to get an iOS user to subscribe if you
don’t sell in-app.

Two other music subscription services — Rhapsody and Rdio — have
also agreed to sell subscriptions within Apple’s app, though Rdio
raised the price for in-app subscriptions from $10 a month to
$15 a month to accommodate Apple’s tariff.

But Spotify, which is much larger than all three of the services,
hasn’t made the move. Spotify does have a free, ad-supported tier
available on its mobile app.

So Apple is making money on music subscriptions even though iTunes itself doesn’t (yet?) offer them.

Jean-Louis Gassée, on the widespread expectation that year-over-year iPad sales have leveled off:

Despite the inspiring ads, Apple’s hopes for the iPad overshot
what the product can actually deliver. Although there’s a large
numbers of iPad-only users, there’s also a substantial population
of dual-use customers for whom both tablets and conventional PCs
are now part of daily life.

I see the lull in iPad sales as a coming down to reality after
unrealistic expectations, a realization that iPads aren’t as ready
to replace PCs as many initially hoped.

In short, Gassée is arguing that tablet sales have hit a wall, and that the iPad needs to grow more Mac-like capabilities for advanced tasks.

Posit: slow iPad sales are worse news for the PC market: implies
phones can take the greater share of PC use cases.

I find that compelling. We might have overestimated the eventual role of tablets and underestimated the role of phones — and the whole argument is further muddled by the industry-wide move toward 5-inch-ish phone displays.

Eric Perlberg has a chart shown at Photokina 2014, showing the rapid decline of standalone point-shoot-cameras. No surprise, of course: mobile devices equipped with cameras have taken over (and revolutionized) the casual photography market.

Square recorded a loss of roughly $100 million in 2013, broader
than its loss in 2012, according to two people familiar with
the matter.

The five-year-old company paid out roughly $110 million more in
cash last year than it took in, according to two people familiar
with the matter. Over the past three years, the startup has
consumed more than half of the roughly $340 million it has raised
from at least four rounds of equity financing since 2009, two
people familiar with the company’s performance said.

Sunday, 20 April 2014

Duplo starts in a similar way as Pages: A designer creates a set
of layouts. From this set, Pages selects the layout that best fits
the desired content. However, while Pages looks at about 20
candidate layouts, Duplo looks at anywhere between 2000 to 6000
candidates, searching for the best layout to fit the content.

Zachary Crockett, writing for Priceonomics, on Alan Adler, inventor of (among other things) the Aerobie flying disc and the AeroPress coffee maker:

Adler says the mainstream toy industry has a tendency to push out
new products every three years. “Parker Brothers, for instance,
has a quota of ten new toys every year at the NY Toy Fair,” he
tells us. Aerobie finds this practice counter-intuitive, and goes
against the grain:

“A lot of companies feel the need to release new products; they’ll
release products that never really deserved to be sold! They’re
just not that good. We don’t look at it that way: we only release
products that we think are innovative and offer excellent play
value. Companies often spoil products by revising them in an
effort to make them new.”

Conversely, Aerobie has stuck with a relatively small list of
products (18, over a 30 year business), and has never had to
discontinue a product (this is a routine practice at major toy
manufacturers).

Friday, 18 April 2014

Nike is gearing up to shutter its wearable-hardware efforts, and
the sportswear company this week fired the majority of the team
responsible for the development of its FuelBand fitness tracker, a
person familiar with the matter told CNET. […]

There’s increasing competition in the market for wrist-worn
fitness trackers, and Nike’s digital app ecosystem, Nike+, has
grown less reliant on wearables as smartphone sensors have
improved. In other words, it makes less and less sense for Nike to
stay in the hardware race when its physical wearables are not
bottom-line needle movers, especially as companies like Apple and
Google prepare to join the fray.

Interesting, particularly when you consider that Tim Cook sits on the Nike board — and that he wears a FuelBand.

My thanks to JetPens, one of my favorite companies in the world, for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. JetPens offers an incredible selection of the best pens, pencils, and office toys from around the world. A few of their latest items:

Fonts are great, but using them well can be hard. Volumes have
been written about typography, yet every good designer will say
there are no rules; there is no magic formula for success.
Typography simply takes practice. Typography is a practice.

So today, we’re launching a new website: Typekit Practice, a place
where novices and experts alike can hone their typographic skills.
We hope it will help students learn, help teachers teach, and help
professionals stay sharp.

The company is planning to unveil a song-discovery feature in an
update of its iOS mobile software that will let users identify a
song and its artist using an iPhone or iPad, said two people with
knowledge of the product, who asked not to be identified because
the feature isn’t public. Apple is working with Shazam
Entertainment Ltd., whose technology can quickly spot what’s
playing by collecting sound from a phone’s microphone and matching
it against a song database. […]

Among the ways it can be used will be through Apple’s
voice-activated search feature, Siri. An iPhone user will be able
to say something like “what song is playing,” to find out the
tune’s details, one person said.

It has been nearly a year since the first iOS 7 beta, and
something about tint color still bugs me. In fact it bothered me
enough at the time of the early betas that a filed a bug on it
with Apple, something I very rarely do. The problem isn’t so much
in the concept of tint color, which I like; having a consistent
color for buttons and links, especially now that buttons are so
understated, makes a lot of sense. The problem is the
implementation in apps that use tint color anytime they want to
highlight something, whether it is tappable or not.

Thursday, 17 April 2014

Shallow depth of field makes the object of interest “pop” by
bringing the foreground into focus and de-emphasizing the
background. Achieving this optical effect has traditionally
required a big lens and aperture, and therefore hasn’t been
possible using the camera on your mobile phone or tablet.

That all changes with Lens Blur, a new mode in the Google Camera
app. It lets you take a photo with a shallow depth of field using
just your Android phone or tablet. Unlike a regular photo, Lens
Blur lets you change the point or level of focus after the photo
is taken. You can choose to make any object come into focus simply
by tapping on it in the image.

Interesting idea. Like filters, it’s another way to use software cleverness to work around the physical limitations of the small cameras in mobile devices.

But there is another form of ignorance which seems to be
universal: the inability to understand the concept and role of
innovation. The way this is exhibited is in the misuse of the term
and the inability to discern the difference between novelty,
creation, invention and innovation. The result is a failure to
understand the causes of success and failure in business and hence
the conditions that lead to economic growth.

This is a step toward understanding why so many people get Apple so very wrong. If you don’t understand what innovation really is, you’re not going to understand an innovative company.

Some might think that Yahoo doesn’t need to do as big a job as
Google or Bing does. Maybe it just needs to focus on answering
popular questions. That, however, overlooks the fact that if Yahoo
can’t answer virtually every question tossed at it, consumers will
get frustrated. For all the talk about mobile search, contextual
search, popular answers, predictive search, local listings, it’s
web search that remains the core foundation that everything is
built off of. If you don’t have that foundation, everything can
topple over.

As Sullivan points out, after the maps switch, Apple is probably more gun-shy about dropping Google as the default web search provider than they otherwise would have been.

Speaking of great updates to my favorite Mac apps, the latest version of the amazing Tumult Hype — a professional HTML5 animation tool — has a slew of new features, including support for responsive design. Hard to believe this app costs only $30.

While seeing iOS devices on a big screen in Moscone West was
normal to us, we knew you’d never see Apple feature Android or
Windows Mobile devices in their keynotes.

Nor should they. That’s not a criticism — that’s just not Apple’s
thing. It’s the new Microsoft’s thing to be cosmopolitan.

I talked to a number of Microsoft employees — on the Azure side
— and got the same sense from all of them. They’re excited.
They know they’re underdogs; they know that Amazon Web Services is
dominant.

They also know that the kind of dominance Microsoft once had —
where just about everything that computed ran Windows — is gone
and will never come back.

Could just be my skewed perspective, but one thing I didn’t see much of at Build were references to Android. Like Brent notes, there were many references to iPhone and iPad development, including demos during the keynote (not to mention Q Branch’s brief moment in the spotlight). But Android, not so much.

Microsoft has in no way given up on Windows Phone or the tablet market. But the change I detect is a narrowing of their focus. They now (correctly, I say) view Android/Google as their competition, rather than “everyone”. And there’s a decided “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” thing going on with iOS/Apple too. I hope Apple sees the same thing.

I’m a few weeks late linking to this, but I didn’t want to let it slide. Long-time iOS developer Justin Williams, on attending Microsoft’s Build developer conference:

One of the biggest differences I noticed between an event like
Build and WWDC was in the subtle messaging. Both Apple and
Microsoft are massive companies that make billions of dollars and
answer to their shareholders. Both companies also offer
development platforms for third-parties to integrate with.

What’s different though is that it feels like Microsoft is more
interested in working with us as a partner whereas Apple has
always given off a vibe of just sort of dealing with us because
they have to. Maybe that’s a little sour grapes, but as a
developer it was a nice change.

The differences from WWDC — especially since both were held in the same venue, Moscone West — were fascinating to me. Little things, like the keynote hall being arranged sideways (wide, rather than deep), to big things, like a press room that was open all conference long. At WWDC, press passes are good only for the Monday morning keynote; at Build, invited press can stay all conference long and attend sessions.

It’s not so much that Microsoft is friendlier, but rather that Apple is distant — cooler, in several senses of the word.

Windows Phone 8.1, therefore, has a lot of work to do. It needs to take further steps along the path toward Microsoft’s vision of a unified operating system. It needs to work better on a wider range of hardware to both strengthen its position at the low end and give it a chance of making inroads at the high end. It needs to also offer features: it needs to do things to get people talking about the platform while attracting both users and developers.

What is gunking up your screens is Samsung’s usual not-fully-thought-through assemblage of app flotsam. Why do you need one app for Gmail and another for other kinds of email accounts? Why do you need two photo apps — one from Samsung, one from Google? Two Settings apps? Two text-messaging apps? Two video players?

This is the dark side of the Android experience: One company makes the hardware, another makes the software. Now they’re becoming rivals, and we can already see who the loser will be: you.

My favorite part is the “one-handed mode”. And what’s the deal with all those inscrutable icons in the status bar?

This is a product I wanted to love, but ultimately, it just ended up being a huge disappointment. Hopefully Samsung can iterate quickly on the software, and move the platform forward to something that someone might actually want to buy. In the meantime, mine is going into my desk drawer.

Wednesday, 16 April 2014

Matt Richman argues that Intel is a natural fit to manufacture ARM CPUs for Apple:

This arrangement would benefit both companies in a number of ways.
Apple would no longer depend upon Samsung, its biggest competitor,
to produce the chips at the heart of its most successful products.
(This is analogous to America asking China to build its most
advanced missiles and hoping the country won’t use any of the
top-secret technology it learns about for its own benefit when
it’s clearly in China’s best interest to do so.) And because Intel
has manufacturing capabilities that other companies don’t, Apple
might well be able to create better chips than it would be able to
if it were to continue using Samsung as its chip manufacturer.
Finally, the company would have peace of mind knowing that its
chip producer doesn’t stand to gain anything from a processor
shortfall, as Samsung does. Even if the factory were to cost $5
billion — and it wouldn’t — it’d be worth it. Steve Jobs said
Apple’s cash hoard is for “big, bold” “strategic opportunities”.
This move exemplifies that thinking.

Speaking of Chris Ware, I’m deeply intrigued by his thoughts on Apple, from a 2012 interview with Christopher Irving for Graphic NYC:

“I really admire Apple’s design, and feel that the general idea
and driving principle behind it almost since their inception is to
make information tactile. They’re finally getting to this point
now where one can manipulate information with the hands and the
body. As designers, they’re also so sensitive in ways that I don’t
think any other computer makers understand, as their chief
designer knows it has to do with very measured, combined
subtleties of tactility and weight and gesture and materials. In a
way, they’re almost a nineteenth century company, more sensitive
to the world of nature than to technology, or at least respectful
of it. I can certainly see reading comics electronically, with the
possibilities for inter-penetrability of story and image, but I
think comics will have to develop into something completely
different before that happens.”

Ever since I made this video of David Letterman talking to
drummers, I’ve wondered if he’s actually seen it. I recently
asked one of his writers, Bill Scheft, on Twitter. According to
Scheft, not only has Letterman watched it, but “he loved it as he
loved few things﻿.” I realize that it just seems like I’m
bragging on the internet, but that’s about the greatest thing
I’ve ever heard.﻿

With all the news surrounding Letterman’s retirement, it feels
like a fine time to revisit the video.

I remain highly skeptical that a modular design can compete in a product category where size, weight, and battery life are at such a premium. Even if they can bring something to market, why would any normal person be interested in a phone like this?

Monday, 14 April 2014

Unfortunately, I fear that tech-industry observers have completely
lost their perspective. As Rene has written, no matter how
big the wearables market gets, it’s still not going to touch the
smartphone market.

IDC reported that in 2013, one billion smartphones were shipped,
up 38 percent from the previous year. That’s a fast-growing market
worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, on Thursday IDC
predicted that the wearables market will reach 112 million units
in 2018.

In other words, in four years the wearables market might grow to
be one-tenth the size of today’s smartphone market — in units
shipped. Presumably the average selling price of wearable items
will be a fraction of that of smartphones, meaning the dollar
value of the wearables market is even more minuscule compared to
the smartphone market.

The pricing issue is a big one: carrier-subsidized pricing blinds many people to the fact that iPhones really sell for $700-800 a pop. Some analyst predicted last week that Apple will sell watches “priced at several thousand dollars”. Maybe they will, but if they do, they sure as shit aren’t going to sell as many of them as they do iPhones.

It feels a lot more likely to me that any new wearable devices from Apple will be priced more along the line of iPods: in the $100-400 range. Maybe a little higher at the outset, coming down over time. (I wouldn’t even be surprised if they use the iPod brand for them.)

Saturday, 12 April 2014

My thanks to Igloo — “the intranet you’ll actually like” — for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. This week Igloo introduced four new templates to help start your next intranet project. You can start with:

an app-based social intranet;

a corporate intranet;

a customer community;

or a partner portal

Igloo’s new templates share a unified visual language, but your Igloo can be fully designed to match your brand and the way your business is structured. All Igloo templates feature responsive design, so they looks great on any device — desktop, tablet, or phone. Igloo built its own public-facing website using the Igloo platform.

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Fedor Indutny, a core member of the node.js team, has proved that
it is in fact possible for an attacker to sniff out the private
SSL keys from a server left exposed by the Heartbleed bug. The
proof came in response to a challenge from CloudFlare that called
on the security community to grab the keys from a demo server.

Even judging by the low standards of creepy data-mining apps,
“Brightest Flashlight” did something pretty egregious. The free
app, which was installed by at least 50 million Android users,
transmitted users’ real-time locations to ad networks and other
third parties. It was, in other words, a stalking device disguised
as a flashlight.

Friday, 11 April 2014

Comic fans may groan about the sale — it’s always sad when a plucky, groundbreaking start-up is bought out by a corporate giant — but Amazon’s track record with purchases is actually pretty good. The company has bought Zappos, Goodreads, Woot, and Audible, all of which continue to operate more or less as they did before, rather than being integrated into Amazon.com.

Sweet typography-centric playing card design by Robert Padbury. The Kickstarter project is just a few days old, but already fully-funded. I say we all pile on and make this project a big hit. (Bonus: the t-shirts are being printed by my pal Brian Jaramillo, who’s handled all DF t-shirts for many years.)

This week we learned, thanks to a February 2012 internal Samsung
document marked “top secret” and unearthed by Apple as part of its
ongoing patent infringement proceedings, that we were right and
those more credulous news outlets were wrong.

When Strategy Analytics was telling the world that Samsung sold 2
million Galaxy Tabs in six weeks, the truth was that it took
Samsung all of 2011 to sell half that many.

Shocker. But as Elmer-DeWitt points out, the blame doesn’t lie solely with Samsung or even Strategy Analytics — it lies also with the news outlets that gleefully passed along the report as fact. The reason: they wanted it to be true. iPad Continues to Dominate Tablet Sales is a boring story.

The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years
about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive
information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it
to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the
matter said.

The NSA’s decision to keep the bug secret in pursuit of national
security interests threatens to renew the rancorous debate over
the role of the government’s top computer experts.

So Steve started the rehearsal, going through slides on the
“Switcher” ad campaign and then the Apple Stores.

At the end of the retail update, he was supposed to conclude
with something like “1.4 million visitors in the month of
December alone,” but he added, “so to all of you in the press
who doubted us…”

And then clicked to reveal his special slide — poster art I’m
sure everyone has seen before — a 1940’s-style rendering of a
grinning man holding a big mug of coffee next to his face with
this text alongside like a world balloon:

“How about a nice cup of shut the fuck up.”

And then the best part — the part we didn’t know was coming —
Steve paused, turned to his V.P. of Marketing and deadpanned,
“What do you think, Phil? Too much?”

Some potentially good news on the OppenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability front, from CloudFlare:

While the vulnerability seems likely to put private key data at
risk, to date there have been no verified reports of actual
private keys being exposed. At CloudFlare, we received early
warning of the Heartbleed vulnerability and patched our systems 12
days ago. We’ve spent much of the time running extensive tests to
figure out what can be exposed via Heartbleed and, specifically,
to understand if private SSL key data was at risk.

Here’s the good news: after extensive testing on our software
stack, we have been unable to successfully use Heartbleed on a
vulnerable server to retrieve any private key data. Note that is
not the same as saying it is impossible to use Heartbleed to get
private keys. We do not yet feel comfortable saying that. However,
if it is possible, it is at a minimum very hard. And, we have
reason to believe based on the data structures used by OpenSSL and
the modified version of NGINX that we use, that it may in fact be
impossible.

And now, back to changing passwords on a slew of my accounts around the web.

At Facebook, we have unique storage scalability challenges when it comes to our data warehouse. Our warehouse stores upwards of 300 PB of Hive data, with an incoming daily rate of about 600 TB. In the last year, the warehouse has seen a 3× growth in the amount of data stored. Given this growth trajectory, storage efficiency is and will continue to be a focus for our warehouse infrastructure.

600 TB of incoming data per day is mind-blowing. I can’t fathom it. And it’s great that they’re sharing this information. There can’t be that many entities dealing with this scale of data storage, and the others likely aren’t sharing what they’ve learned. This is the cutting edge of computer science.

Eye-opening feature by Steven Godfrey for SBNation on the stream of money paid to college football recruits and players:

Remember, your job as a bag man isn’t to hide the benefit. It’s to
hide the proof. In a region as passionate about college football
as the American South, there’s no real moral outrage when new cars
or clothes or jobs for relatives appear.

“We can only get away with whatever’s considered reasonable by the
majority of the folks in our society. That’s why it’s different in
the SEC. Maybe that’s why we’re able to be more active in what we
do. Because no one ever looks at the car or the jewelry and says,
‘How did you get that, poor football player?’ They say, ‘How did
they get you that and not get caught, poor football player?’”

Thursday, 10 April 2014

Several designers I spoke with said they were under the impression
that Hoefler was almost exclusively focused on managing the
business in recent years, leaving design to Frere-Jones. This
makes it easy to cast Hoefler in the role of the villain
exploiting the work of a naïve genius. But Hoefler and
Frere-Jones’s relationship was more complicated than that, says
Mike Essl, who teaches design at Cooper Union. Hoefler had all of
Frere-Jones’s design chops, but also had the ability to propel
Frere-Jones to prominence in a way he couldn’t have done on his
own. Business partnerships rarely last forever, says Essl, and
when they end, it’s often ugly. “Van Halen isn’t going to be Van
Halen forever,” he says. “Someone is going to leave.”

Tucked away near the end of a Businessweek article on the startup
is news of Rice taking a fourth seat on the board:

The former secretary of state’s consulting firm, RiceHadleyGates,
has been advising the startup on management issues for the last
year. Now she’ll help the company think about such matters as
international expansion and privacy, an issue that dogs every
cloud company in the age of Edward Snowden and the NSA.

Here’s an argument for counting them as “both, sometimes”:
Quantcast, the Web measurement/ad company, says nearly a quarter
of mobile Web views may be coming from in-app browsers running on
Facebook or Twitter. That is: People who click on links and open
up stories are in apps and on the Web, at the same time.

Yes, fans of Colbert “in character” will miss his show, but the
truth is that the format, despite being an excellent vehicle that
launched Colbert to stardom, was far too limiting for Colbert’s
talent. He’s absolutely going to blossom with this new freedom.
From his time on Strangers With Candy to The Daily Show and
The Colbert Report, he’s shown his comedic talent in various
forms with an improve performer’s fluidity. Those are traits that
will make him instantly watchable doing his own taped (and live)
skits on The Late Show, plus they will serve him well behind the
desk doing interviews.

“Simply being a guest on David Letterman’s show has been a highlight of my career,” Mr. Colbert said in a statement. “I never dreamed that I would follow in his footsteps, though everyone in late night follows Dave’s lead.”

He added: “I’m thrilled and grateful that CBS chose me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go grind a gap in my front teeth.”

Great choice. Should keep Late Show the funniest of the late night shows.

Wednesday, 9 April 2014

According to multiple sources inside and outside the company,
Christie’s exit has been known for weeks — and planned for even
longer. His stepping aside has been designed to allow for a
transition of leadership inside the Human Interface group.
Christie worked under Forstall for many years, and there may have
been plenty of times he didn’t agree with Ive, but there has
reportedly been a distinct lack of drama in this transition.

If there was any ill-will between Christie and Ive, it doesn’t
appear to have taken the form of any open conflict and a flare-up
of friction was apparently not behind this exit.

Mr. Christie’s group will report to Mr. Ive, who is Apple’s senior
vice president of design, according to the email. The team
previously reported to Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief.

“Greg has been planning to retire later this year after nearly 20
years at Apple,” said a company spokesman. “He has made vital
contributions to Apple products across the board, and built a
world-class human interface team which has worked closely with
[Jonathan] for many years.”

I’ve been asking around since the news broke this afternoon. What I’ve heard, from several sources: Christie and Ive may not see eye to eye on UI design style, but his departure isn’t nearly as contentious as Mark Gurman’s report at 9to5Mac implies. The basic gist I’ve heard is that Christie is a guy who’s been in a high-pressure, high-profile job for 18 years, most of it reporting to Steve Jobs. He’s made a lot of money and is ready to enjoy it. That’s largely in line with the Apple PR line given to the WSJ, but I heard all of this from ground-level Cupertino-area pixel-pushing designers.

Interestingly, Christie’s retirement was announced internally a few weeks ago — yet it didn’t leak outside the company until today. Also interesting (and backing up the company line that his departure is not contentious): he’s staying at the company until later this year — and from what I’ve heard, it’s more like “end of the year”. If it’s ugly, why hang around?

There’s no way to spin the fact that Ive is taking more authority (or perhaps better said, consolidating all aspects of “design” under his direct authority), and surely that played some part in Christie’s decision. But from what I’ve gathered, it is wrong to think that Ive in any way forced Christie out.

Following friction between top Apple Human Interface Vice President Greg Christie and Senior Vice President Jony Ive, Apple’s hardware and software design is being dramatically shaken up, according to sources familiar with the matter. After adding human interface design direction to his responsibilities in 2012, Ive will soon completely subsume Apple’s software design group, wresting control away from long-time human interface design chief Christie, according to sources briefed on the matter.

Tuesday, 8 April 2014

Special guest Ed Bott joins me for a special episode of my podcast, recorded in front of a live audience at Microsoft’s Build developer conference in San Francisco last week. Topics include the news from the conference — including Windows Phone 8.1 — and a broader look at the new Microsoft and its position in the industry.

As for how powerful these apps are, consider this. I loaded up
my 575 page Windows 8.1 Field Guide Word document, and while
it took a while to download originally (it’s stored in
OneDrive for Business as part of my Office 365 Small Business
Premium subscription), the performance reading and editing the
document was impressive. In fact, it was… amazing. This is
the real deal.

As important, the fidelity of the document was perfect: Everything
was formatted correctly, including images. I could actually write
a book on this thing if I wanted to. (Relax, I don’t.) Microsoft
claims that documents look as good on the iPad as they do on the
PC. And I gotta say. They really do.

Monday, 7 April 2014

I re-read Maurice Annenberg’s “Type Foundries of America and their
Catalogs”, tracked down business directories of the period, and
spent too much time in Google Earth. But I was able to plot out
the locations for every foundry that had been active in New York
between 1828 (the earliest records I could find with addresses) to
1909 (see below). All of the buildings have been demolished, and
in some cases the entire street has since been erased. But a
startling picture still emerged: New York once had a neighborhood
for typography.

(I couldn’t help but take note of Frere-Jones’s own type choices for his site: Benton Modern and Interstate from The Font Bureau — both of which he designed prior to the Hoefler deal.)

Amazon doesn’t innovate by crafting new product categories, like
Apple does. It also doesn’t make much money selling its hardware.
Instead, it takes all the data it gathers as the world’s biggest
online retailer, breaks down exactly what’s available and what
consumers want, then produces a piece of hardware that it can sell
cheaply in order to bring consumers into its ecosystem. Just as
Netflix created House of Cards to satisfy the particular tastes of
its viewers, Amazon made the Fire TV because millions of buyers
are already looking for it. To understand the Fire TV is to take
one glance at Amazon’s best-selling electronics list: two Roku
models, Google’s Chromecast, and the Apple TV are the only
non-Amazon devices in the top 10. The world’s largest online
retailer just took on all three.

Fascinating email from Jobs to Phil Schiller, entered as evidence in the latest round of the Apple/Samsung patent trial. Makes me wonder, again, whether this legal fight is worth it for Apple. Far more of Apple’s internal dynamics have been revealed through this lawsuit than through unauthorized leaks in the past few years.

It does go to show, though, that Steve Jobs was keenly aware of Apple’s competitive shortcomings. They never show it in public, which leads some to perceive the company as more arrogant than it actually is, and perhaps even out of touch.

It’s also a good deal for Tonx, which was attempting to raise
more money to purchase its own coffee roaster (it currently has a
contract deal where it rents one on the weekends) and open a store
front. While neither announced a price, Tonx did abandon a $4
million fundraising round it had been pursuing recently.
Presumably, the deal would be on par with that. It’s a big win
for the three year-old roaster that’s based in Los Angeles, but
lives all over the Internet.

“Tony and I were still bagging and boxing the coffee ourselves
last year, spending all day just listening to podcasts” recalled
Bauman. “Tony would go in and sometimes would take eight hours
or so of just stamping bags. We’d go and just stamp and listen
to [John Gruber’s] The Talk Show or This American Life.”

We launched Emu for iPhone on April 2, and we’ve pulled Emu for
Android out of the Play Store. We hope we’ll return to Android
someday, but our team is too small to innovate and iterate on
multiple platforms simultaneously. We’ve concluded iPhone is a
better place to be:

Our decision to build on top of SMS/MMS involved huge,
unanticipated technical hurdles.

Even when you don’t support older Android versions,
fragmentation is a huge drain on resources.

Google’s tools and documentation are less advanced, and less
stable, than Apple’s.

Interesting on two levels. First, the content of the story — these maps and statistics show why simplistic market share comparisons do not even vaguely tell the story of the competitive dynamics between iOS and Android.

Second, it’s an interesting contrast in headline writing. I’m linking to a reprint of the story on Slate. Slate’s headline: “Here’s Why Developers Keep Favoring Apple Over Android”. The original, published on Business Insider: “These Maps Show That Android Is For People With Less Money”. When you look at the web page titles (what you see in your browser tab), the contrast is even more stark: “Apple vs. Android: Developers See a Socioeconomic Divide” vs. “Android Is for Poor People: Maps”.

Kahan calls this theory Identity-Protective Cognition: “As a way
of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups,
individuals subconsciously resist factual information that
threatens their defining values.” Elsewhere, he puts it even more
pithily: “What we believe about the facts,” he writes, “tells us
who we are.” And the most important psychological imperative most
of us have in a given day is protecting our idea of who we are,
and our relationships with the people we trust and love.

Kahan’s research tells us we can’t trust our own reason. How
do we reason our way out of that?

This is one reason why I went to Build last week — I don’t want to fall into this trap. I want to find the best in design and technology, no matter the platform.

Sunday, 6 April 2014

Saturday, 5 April 2014

My thanks to Crashlytics for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. They provide tools for iOS and Android that allow developers to spend less time finding bugs and more time fixing them. Crashlytics provides deep, actionable insights, right down to the line of code your app crashed on.

The Crashlytics platform is designed for scale and enterprise-level security. They’re trusted by apps like Square, Amazon, Yelp, and Path, and they offer unlimited developer seats at no cost. Really — it’s free. It’s a great deal and a great service.

Although there was variability across the board, biological men
were significantly more likely to prioritize motion parallax.
Biological women relied more heavily on shape-from-shading. In
other words, men are more likely to use the cues that 3D virtual
reality systems relied on.

This, if broadly true, would explain why I, being a woman, vomited
in the CAVE: My brain simply wasn’t picking up on signals the
system was trying to send me about where objects were, and this
made me disoriented.

Wednesday, 2 April 2014

Cortana is named after a virtual character in Halo,
Microsoft’s science-fiction video game series, that uses her
encyclopedic knowledge about the universe to help the game’s
protagonist, Master Chief. The actress, Jen Taylor, who does the
voice for the character, also provided recordings for the phone
assistant’s voice.

Two things jumped out at me regarding this story. First, that Microsoft gladly credited the actress supplying Cortana’s voice. Second, that Google and Android went unmentioned in the article.

Tuesday, 1 April 2014

In research soon to be published in the journal Management Science, we studied umpires’ strike-zone calls using pitch-location data compiled by the high-speed cameras introduced by Major League Baseball several years ago in an effort to measure, monitor and reward umpires’ accuracy. After analyzing more than 700,000 pitches thrown during the 2008 and 2009 seasons, we found that umpires frequently made errors behind the plate — about 14 percent of non-swinging pitches were called erroneously.

What I want to know is how come the umps always have it in for the Yankees?

Charles Arthur, writing for The Guardian, on the demand for the current crop of wearables:

A quick search on eBay for “Galaxy Gear” (excluding the words “protector” and “seal” which are used to sell add-ons) turns up nearly 900 results, of which this one, chosen at random, is typical: “I got it free with my Galaxy Note 3 and do not want this.”